NOTE TO READERS: In keeping with our philosophy of lifelong learning, we are now on Twitter as @cachemaniacs. If you’re interested, there’s a Twitter follow button over on the sidebar or you can just click the link above.

After the smoke cleared from my divorce in 2002, I lived about 1/2 mile down the road from my former spouse and two kids, who were then 9 (Ben) and 13 (Karen). Despite the fact that The Ex and I didn’t agree on a whole lot, we buried the hatchet when it came to the kids. I spent a lot of time with them. Every summer from 2003 to 2010, Ben and I went on a road trip somewhere for a couple of weeks. In 2005, we discovered geocaching and we were hooked.

In June of 2006, we headed off to Yellowstone. We did it right, staying at the Old Faithful Lodge. Afterwards we went up to Bozeman, Montana to do some back country geocaching. It was all day trips. We both love to go out and get dirty and nasty – as long as we can clean up in our air conditioned hotel room when we’re done. After 20 years in the Marines, I’ll never spend another night in the field. But anyway, on with the story…

Ben at Old Faithful. We did Yellowstone right.

In one of our searches, we came up with a geocache called the Trolls Cache. It was halfway between Bozeman and Livingston way back in the Gallatin National Forest. On the day we went after it, it hadn’t been found in two years.

We headed for it in early afternoon. It seemed like we drove forever on a series of dirt roads that got progressively worse and worse. Our Magellan SporTrak Map GPS finally got us to a point that had ground zero about 300 yards to our right – across a stream and up a steep mountain. Off we went. We walked and walked and walked. Most of it was uphill. The area had been lumbered out years before, so there was thick new growth and lots of ankle-breaking flotsam and jetsam on the ground. It was hot, slow going. Like idiots, we didn’t take any water because we figured it would be a short jaunt. We also found out later that this is prime grizzly habitat and we had nothing for bear defense.

At some point I turned around and realized that I couldn’t see the car anymore and the sun was below the ridgeline. Shadows were getting deep and dark fast. We were about 50 yards away from Ground Zero when I told him we had to back off. It wasn’t safe. So we made our way back down the mountain thinking now we know why no one has found it in two years. We drove out of the forest after dark.

I was still surveying the top of the hill on our second attempt when Ben made a beeline for this geo-beacon. The camera just happened to be at the right place at the right time to record the find.

Back at the hotel, we were bummed out. We decided to take another shot at it. We fired up Google Earth and got out the Delorme Montana Gazetteer. We found what looked like an old road, maybe a lumber trail, that led up to the cache. It would be a walk along the ridgeline instead of going up the mountain. The next day, we were off in early morning with a map, GatorAde, lunch and bear spray.

Ben opens the prize at Ground Zero.

The rental car company would have had a cow if they had seen the roads, rocks and stream crossings we negotiated with their AWD Murano. But we found the trail and parked about 1/2 mile from the cache. Twenty minutes later, we were on top of the mountain and Ben made the find in short order. It was an ammo box in great condition.

After high fives and some trash talking, we celebrated by sitting on a stump, drinking GatorAde, eating lunch and soaking up the gorgeous and rugged panorama that was present at Ground Zero.

The view from Ground Zero. We took it in while eating lunch. The haze in the background is smoke from a distant forest fire.

This was the toughest geocache he and I have ever gotten. We learned some hard lessons on this one. For me, the biggest one was I’m not a Marine anymore. I don’t have to get hurt or killed to find a cache. Ben, who was 13 at the time, was tough and had his game face on the whole time. I asked him how many of his buddies had found an ammo box in the Montana wilderness lately. He got a confidence builder and a crash course in real world decision making which he never forgot.

Six years later, the kid is grown up and off to college, but we still laugh and shake our heads over the Trolls Cache.

NOTE TO READERS: In keeping with our philosophy of lifelong learning, we are now on Twitter as @cachemaniacs. If you’re interested, there’s a Twitter follow button over on the sidebar or you can just click this link.

This is the long abandoned Montana Mine in Ruby, Arizona, a ghost town about 75 miles south of Tucson and five miles from the Mexican border. Starting in 1877, a succession of owners spent 40 years carving out a meager existence mining gold and hoping to strike it rich. None of them did and by the early 1920’s, Ruby and its mine were on the verge of becoming a footnote in Arizona history. Then in 1926, a mining corporation from Joplin, MO came in and converted it into a successful lead mine. During the Great Depression, Ruby was a full fledged boomtown. At its peak in the 1930’s, it covered 400 acres and had 1,200 people, 300 of whom were miners. Mining went on 24×7 with an average wage of $3 a day. When the mine closed in 1940, the town died.

The mine was dug into a ridgeline called Eggshell Hill overlooking Ruby. There was a single shaft that went down almost 1,000 feet and nine levels of subterranean tunnels, along with secondary shafts in many directions. There were so many that the entire hill became unstable to the point where several decades ago, a portion of the southeast end of it collapsed. This exposed a cross-section of the mine – just like someone sliced off the end of the hill so you could see inside.

I call it The Bat Cave. From May to September, it’s the home of an estimated 200,000 Mexican free-tailed bats. They swarm at dusk and dawn, blackening the sky above Ruby for almost five minutes. Biologists estimate they eat several tons of bugs every night.

You can clearly see the honeycomb of shafts and levels of the Montana Mine. They keep going down into the darkness but the edge was too unstable to risk a closer look. I was already past the warning sign. With binoculars and proper light, you can see timbers, hopper cars, wooden ladders and railroad track. This is where the Mexican freetail bats swarm in and out of from May to September.

I was never much of a photographer but have become increasingly interested in it as we continue our adventures in retirement. As such, I’ve always got a camera with me primed and ready. You never know when you’ll run into the mythical “Place That Nobody Knows About and Few Have Seen.” This one definitely qualifies.

Here’s a closeup of the top of the cave in. You get a much better view of the remnants in the shafts. With binoculars and some favorable light, you can see even more.

Almost all of my pictures are done on the move and on the fly, with little planning and setup time. You come upon some great shots but grabbing them can be challenging. Neither of these pictures really do the area justice. It’s a massive cave in and it goes down into the blackness almost 1,000 feet. There’s a single strand of rusty barbed wire fence around the top and a warning sign – both of which I ignored. Anything for the shot.

I took both pictures with a Nikon D3100 on automatic settings, an 18-270mm lens and a circular polarizer. It was about 4:00 PM in January and the light/shadows were not helpful. In the original photos, the mine area is pitch black and the sunny slopes are almost whiteouts. I edited them in Picasa to bring out as much detail as I could. By altering the light and saturating the color, they came out pretty well. If we go back, I’ll try a series of shots for an HDR photo.

This one is from my pre-Natasha days – my single Spartan divorced middle-aged male phase. From June of 2006, the Trolls Cache.

In June of 2006, my son Ben and I headed out for our annual summer road trip. He was 13 at the time and we had just discovered geocaching the previous year. We were both hooked. This would be the first of many big geocaching expeditions. After Yellowstone and white water rafting on the Gallatin River, we headed to Bozeman, Montana for some back country geocaching.

In those days, smart phone apps and geocaching on-the-fly weren’t around yet. There was a lot more planning involved and a lot less flexibility.

The GPS we had were Magellan SporTrak Map models. They were first generation hand helds but they got the job done. We sometimes had to stick them out the window to get good GPS fixes.

Navigation was done by laptop using Delorme Street Atlas. So we had to do a search in an area, pick out the caches we wanted to do, print off the cache sheet then enter it as a destination in Street Atlas. It was primitive by today’s standards but pretty much state-of-the-art then.

We didn’t have Internet in the car, so we did our searching and prep at the hotel, then loaded up the laptop, Street Atlas and the Magellans with everything we’d need. The laptop had external USB GPS and a power converter for the car, so we could run it whenever we needed. We even had a small USB Canon printer that we could run in the back of the car if needed. Ben became quite adept at doing all that and navigating in the car with a laptop.

In one of our searches, we came up with a geocache called the Trolls Cache. It was halfway between Bozeman and Livingston way back in the Gallatin National Forest. It hadn’t been found in almost two years. We decided to take a crack at it.

We headed for it in early afternoon. It seemed like we drove forever on a series of dirt roads that got progressively worse and worse. Our navigation finally got us to a point that had ground zero about 1/4 of a mile to our right – across a stream and up a steep mountain. Off we went. We walked and walked and walked. Most of it was uphill. The area had been lumbered out years before, so there was thick new growth and lots of ankle-breaking flotsam and jetsam on the ground. It was hot, slow going. Like idiots, we didn’t take any water because we figured it would be a short jaunt. We also found out later that this is prime grizzly habitat and we had nothing for bear defense.

At some point I turned around and realized that I couldn’t see the car anymore and the sun was below the ridgeline. Shadows were getting deep and dark fast. We were about 50 yards away from Ground Zero when I told him we had to back off. It wasn’t safe. We made our way back down the mountain thinking now we know why no one has found it in two years. The car was barely visible when we came out of the forest and it was pitch black when we drove out.

I was still surveying the top of the hill on our second attempt when Ben made a beeline for this geo-beacon. The camera just happened to be at the right place at the right time to record the find.

Back at the hotel, we were bummed out. We decided to take another shot at it. We fired up Google Earth and got out the Delorme Montana Gazetteer. We found what looked like an old road, maybe a lumber trail, that might lead up to the cache. It would be a walk along the ridgeline instead of going up the mountain. The next day, we were off in early morning with a map, GatorAde, lunch and bear spray.

Ben opens the prize at Ground Zero.

The rental car company would have had a cow if they had seen the roads, rocks and stream crossings we negotiated with their AWD Murano. But we found the trail and parked about 1/2 mile from the cache. Twenty minutes later, we were on top of the mountain and Ben made the find in short order. It was an ammo box in great condition.

After high fives and some trash talking, we celebrated by sitting on a stump, drinking GatorAde, eating lunch and soaking up the gorgeous and rugged panorama that was present at Ground Zero.

The view from Ground Zero. We took it in while eating lunch. The haze in the background is smoke from a distant forest fire.

We learned some hard lessons on this one. For me, the biggest one was I’m not a Marine anymore. I don’t have to get hurt or killed to find a cache. Ben, who was 13 at the time, was tough and had his game face on the whole time. I asked him how many of his buddies had found an ammo box in the Montana wilderness lately. He got a confidence builder and a crash course in real world decision making which he never forgot. Over six years later, the kid is grown up and off to college, but we still laugh and shake our heads over the Trolls Cache.

Forty five miles west of Bozeman, Montana and 60 miles northwest of Yellowstone Park is one of the largest and most spectacular limestone cavern complexes in the western hemisphere. Now part of the Montana State Park system, it was named for the leaders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which passed nearby twice but never saw the caves.

In winter, the 50 degree cave air mixing with the cold air outside creates an effect that looks like smoke coming out of the ground. The local Native Americans knew of the caves for centuries but there’s no indication that they ever went there. It was considered a holy and forbidden place. If they ever explored it, they left absolutely no trace. It was completely unknown to whites until its discovery by hunters in 1895, who were drawn to explore the mysterious ground smoke.

Subsequent to that, a miner and entrepreneur named Dan Morrison staked a claim to the land and began to explore the inside of the cavern. Working by the faint light of carbide headlamps and candle lanterns, he rigged 2,000 wooden steps and began leading eight hour tours through the caverns around the turn of the century. Some of the remnants of those steps can be seen in today’s tours.

A view deep inside the caverns. As part of the tour, shortly after this picture was taken, the guide got us in a small group and turned out the lights. The blackness was unbelievable. The eyes don’t adjust because there is zero light. In the days of Morrison and the CCC, men sometimes found themselves stranded in the caves with no light. Under those circumstances, there is no way out. They simply had to wait until someone found them.

The Northern Pacific Railroad sued over his stake, claiming the land belonged to them. They won, but Morrison kept fighting them and leading tours up to his death in 1932 at age 80.

The railroad gave the land to the federal government and in 1935, the Civilian Conservation Corps went to work. Working under many of the same conditions as Morrison had, they turned the caverns into what they are today. They widened passages and blasted the tunnel through which tours now exit. They also built steps or chiseled them into limestone to replace Morrison’s rickety wooden ones. For safety, they laid an electrical grid to power lights and communications. They also explored all chambers and hauled away tons of bat guano.

Steps built by the CCC showing you’re one mile high inside a mountain.

Today the caverns are part of a 3000 acre park of the same name. There are campsites, hiking and biking trails, a visitor’s center, a store and a cafe (summer only). Cavern tours are available from May 1 to September 30.

The tours are two hours long and can be strenuous. The altitude here is 5300 feet. There is a long uphill walk to the entrance of the cavern, where you meet your guide. During the tour, you will ascend or descend 600 steps, slide through narrow tunnels between chambers and work your way around close passageways. It covers about two linear miles and ends 200 feet below where you started. The temperature is 50 degrees year round. Wear a sweater and good rubber soled shoes. Also bring some water. If you are out of shape, extremely overweight or claustrophobic, you might want to skip this tour. We’ve been on many cave/cavern tours and this one was probably the toughest one we’ve seen that’s open to the general public.

I would also take a flashlight. The cave is wired with lights and communications systems. The guide has radio contact with the Visitor Center at all times and checks in with them regularly. But after being in that darkness for two minutes, I’d have my own backup with me.

KidsRN in the Visitor Center parking lot. Check out the scenery. The caverns are inside the barren mountain on the right. The GPS coordinates for the parking lot of the Lewis and Clark Caverns are N45.838624, W111.866831.

The rest of the park is breath taking (sometimes literally) and is an outdoorsman’s paradise. There are no geocaches in the park, but there are a half dozen within a short drive and they are on the upper end of the difficulty scale. If you’re looking for adventure caching, Montana is the place to be. More information and details about this cool place can be found on Montana’s state park website.

In celebration of Father’s Day, I bring you this story out of the geocaching archives of June 2006.

After the smoke cleared from my divorce in 2002, I lived about 1/2 mile down the road from my former spouse and two kids, who were then 9 (Ben) and 13 (Kari). Despite the fact that The Ex and I didn’t agree on a whole lot, we buried the hatchet when it came to the kids. I spent a lot of time with them. Every summer from 2003 to 2010, Ben and I went on a road trip somewhere for a couple of weeks. Then in 2005, we discovered geocaching and we were hooked.

In June of 2006, we headed off to Yellowstone. We did it right, staying at the Old Faithful Lodge. Afterwards we went up to Bozeman, Montana to do some back country geocaching. It was all day trips. We both love to go out and get dirty and nasty – as long as we can clean up in our air conditioned hotel room when we’re done. After 20 years in the Marines, I’ll never spend another night in the field. But anyway, on with the story…

Ben at Old Faithful. We did Yellowstone right.

In one of our searches, we came up with a geocache called the Trolls Cache. It was halfway between Bozeman and Livingston way back in the Gallatin National Forest. On the day we went after it, it hadn’t been found in two years.

We headed for it in early afternoon. It seemed like we drove forever on a series of dirt roads that got progressively worse and worse. Our Magellan SporTrak Map GPS finally got us to a point that had ground zero about 300 yards to our right – across a stream and up a steep mountain. Off we went. We walked and walked and walked. Most of it was uphill. The area had been lumbered out years before, so there was thick new growth and lots of ankle-breaking flotsam and jetsam on the ground. It was hot, slow going. Like idiots, we didn’t take any water because we figured it would be a short jaunt. We also found out later that this is prime grizzly habitat and we had nothing for bear defense.

At some point I turned around and realized that I couldn’t see the car anymore and the sun was below the ridgeline. Shadows were getting deep and dark fast. We were about 50 yards away from Ground Zero when I told him we had to back off. It wasn’t safe. So we made our way back down the mountain thinking now we know why no one has found it in two years. We drove out of the forest after dark.

I was still surveying the top of the hill on our second attempt when Ben made a beeline for this geo-beacon. The camera just happened to be at the right place at the right time to record the find.

Back at the hotel, we were bummed out. We decided to take another shot at it. We fired up Google Earth and got out the Delorme Montana Gazetteer. We found what looked like an old road, maybe a lumber trail, that led up to the cache. It would be a walk along the ridgeline instead of going up the mountain. The next day, we were off in early morning with a map, GatorAde, lunch and bear spray.

Ben opens the prize at Ground Zero.

The rental car company would have had a cow if they had seen the roads, rocks and stream crossings we negotiated with their AWD Murano. But we found the trail and parked about 1/2 mile from the cache. Twenty minutes later, we were on top of the mountain and Ben made the find in short order. It was an ammo box in great condition.

After high fives and some trash talking, we celebrated by sitting on a stump, drinking GatorAde, eating lunch and soaking up the gorgeous and rugged panorama that was present at Ground Zero.

The view from Ground Zero. We took it in while eating lunch. The haze in the background is smoke from a distant forest fire.

This was the toughest geocache he and I have ever gotten. We learned some hard lessons on this one. For me, the biggest one was I’m not a Marine anymore. I don’t have to get hurt or killed to find a cache. Ben, who was 13 at the time, was tough and had his game face on the whole time. I asked him how many of his buddies had found an ammo box in the Montana wilderness lately. He got a confidence builder and a crash course in real world decision making which he never forgot. Six years later, the kid is grown up and off to college, but we still laugh and shake our heads over the Trolls Cache.

I was never much of a photographer but have become increasingly interested in it as we continue our adventures in retirement. As such, I’ve always got a camera with me primed and ready. You never know when you’ll run into the mythical “Place That Few Have Seen.” This one definitely qualifies.

This is the Montana Mine in Ruby, Arizona, a ghost town about 50 miles southeast of Tucson. Originally a gold mine, it ended up as a successful lead mine during the Great Depression. The town was built to support the mine and when it played out in 1940, the town died.

The mine was dug into a ridgeline overlooking Ruby called Eggshell Hill. There was a single shaft that went down almost 1,000 feet and nine levels of subterranean tunnels, along with secondary shafts in many directions. There were so many that the entire hill became unstable to the point where several decades ago, a portion of the southeast end of it collapsed, exposing a cross-section of the mine – just like someone sliced off the end of the hill so you could see inside.

I call it The Bat Cave. From May to September, it’s the home of over 150,000 Mexican freetail bats. They swarm at dusk and dawn, blackening the sky over Ruby while doing so. Biologists estimate they eat a ton of bugs every night.

You can clearly see the honeycomb of shafts and levels of the Montana Mine. They keep going down into the darkness but the edge was too unstable to risk a closer look. I was already past the warning sign. With binoculars and proper light, you can see timbers, hopper cars, wooden ladders and railroad track. This is where the Mexican freetail bats swarm from May to September.

The quality of the photos is not the greatest. I took both pictures with a Sony DSC-170 (since upgraded to a Nikon D3100). It was about 4:00 PM on January 26, 2012 and the light/shadows were not helpful. In the original photos, the mine area is pitch black and the sunny slopes are almost whiteouts. I edited them in Picasa to bring out as much detail as I could.

Almost all of my pictures are done on the move and on the fly, with little planning and setup time. You come upon some great shots but grabbing them can be challenging. Neither of these pictures really do the area justice. It’s a massive cave in and it goes down into the blackness almost 1,000 feet. There’s a single strand of rusty barbed wire fence around the top and a warning sign – both of which I ignored. Anything for the shot.

Here’s a closeup of the top of the cave in. You get a much better view of the remnants in the shafts. With binoculars and some favorable light, you can see even more. Picasa was a big help with this picture too. I lightened it up and saturated the colors.

Image quality issues aside, this is one of those places that elicits a “You gotta be kiddin’ me” which is why I posted them.

#5. Check everything.Except for burying it, almost anything goes when hiding a cache. We’ve seen them disguised as rocks, pine cones, reflectors, light switches, bird houses, bolts and sheet metal. Look for something that doesn’t belong – a shape. a rock in a tree, a stack of sticks, a color variation, a glint in the sun. Don’t take anything at face value. Look everywhere. Tug, twist, prod, kick or whatever it takes to inspect something. Don’t forget to be discreet about it.

We are all-weather cachers. It can be tough in the winter. You have to read the descriptions carefully and see if it’s accessible then.

#4. If something near GZ looks like a good hide site, check it out. If you’ve done your background work, have a good idea of what your cache is and see a likely hiding spot, go for it. Don’t ignore a good place because the GPSr says it’s too far away. We’ve found caches as far as 100 feet from the posted coordinates. You can post corrected coordinates in your log or you can keep quiet and let the next person fumble around cursing their GPS.

In the Laurel Highlands of western Pennsylvania, here’s Ground Zero. It was a three mile hike on the Laurel Ridge Trail to get here and the bugs are out. Let the search begin. We’re looking for an ammo can and we’re not leaving until we find it.

#3. Take some cache tools. Once you’ve found the cache, you may have other things to deal with. The cache may have to be pulled from a tight place. It may be so small that it takes tweezers to extract the log. It may not have a pencil. The log may be full or wet. The ziploc bags may be torn. Carry a “cache extraction and repair kit” to deal with all that. If the cache is really FUBAR, do what you can and send a note to the owner.

Here it is, an hour later. It was well hidden and tucked away in the rocks. We find our caching sticks, which are five foot lengths of 1 1/2 inch dowel rod, to be indispensable. In terrain like this, they give you a third leg, which comes in handy around here.

#2. Don’t expect the GPSr to take you directly to the cache. This is by far the biggest mistake that new geocachers make and even experienced cachers get lulled into it. All GPS does is get you close. Don’t keep pacing and walking around waiting for it to go to zero and then expect the cache to be at your feet. Once it starts bouncing around in single digits, its job is done. Then it’s time to start looking.

#1. Think like a geocacher. Don’t bury your face in the GPSr. Do your research. Evaluate the terrain and route. When you get to GZ, ask yourself “Where would I hide this?” Leave the cache as you found it or better. Pick up some trash along the way. Geocaching is huge and growing all the time. It is self-regulating and most places are very receptive to it. To keep it that way, we have to be good stewards of the sport and the places where we do it.

Cache on … The Cachemanian Devils

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About the Image

The header photo is a view of the long abandoned OTO Ranch near Gardiner, Montana, the site of our #1 favorite geocache. It was the first guest (dude) ranch in Montana. Not far from the north entrance to Yellowstone Park, it flourished in the early 1900's but folded during the Great Depression. This is back country geocaching at its best - physically challenging, spectacular scenery and lots to explore once the find is made.